What is fake news?

Front matter

Ask me three questions about the syllabus.

Word clouds from “what is news?” freewrite

As you might already know, word clouds (sometimes called tag clouds) are apps/programs are able to represent frequency of words in a batch of text through size or color. Here is a cloud taken from the definitions of news you shared with me in your freewrite from last class. The cloud shows words that had a frequency of at least two (I removed “news” from the cloud for obvious reasons).

What do we notice about this cloud? Given these words, what should we keep in mind as we consider the term “fake news”?

Fake news game

Discuss: How did you decide these answers? What was going on in your minds?

Activity: 1. Get into groups. 2. In a moment I’ll assign your group to research one of the questions from the Kahoot quiz, all of which are found in this Drive folder. 3. Before I do, I want to show you the importance of a phrase search for tracking down specific information.4. Use the phrase search along with your current research skills to understand why the answer was “fake news” or “real news.” What evidence can you find — and how?